I believe we are now witnessing Barack Obama’s Pet Goat moment. In that spirit, let begin by telling a story.

You’re the coach of a football team and your defense sucks at defending against the pass. You have two choices. One choice is to work on your defense. The problem with that choice, first, is that it takes work. The second problem is that working on your defense implies that your goal is to win a game of football and only selfish, aggressive assholes would want to win a game of football.

Your second choice is to admit, in a calm, cool, and collected manner, that your defense against the pass sucks, you hate the idea of conducting a defense, and the whole fascination with defense is way too overrated for your attention. Therefore, your second choice is to advertise, loud and clear, to every potential opponent, that you will no longer be defending against the pass and would all future opponents please proceed down the field in an organized manner, as low to the ground as possible, preferably down the center and within the hash marks. And, by the way, you call this a “strategy”.

You’ll have a few rogue teams with good passing offenses that may be reluctant to take you up on your request. So, for those teams, you’ll need to do more than promote your lack of defense. For those teams, you’ll need to sign a contract, or a “treaty” as it were, promising that neither team will throw a pass against the other, or ever, for that matter. It’s in both your interests, after all, to eliminate sources of unneeded frustration, and to eliminate the need for a pass defense, you can simply eliminate its root cause: the pass. Even if you do both consider yourselves opponents, you can at least agree to conduct your attacks on one another in a mature and respectable fashion. Let’s call it “British army style”, to use a military analogy.

Now, what about those teams who have no passing offense? Teams that, frankly, have a tradition of sucking all-around, where players sometimes start their careers, but apart from massive bribes, threats, or their own insanity, no player will stay of his own accord and only prays for the day he’s traded onto one of the many non-sucking teams? What do you think those teams might practice in training camp? I’m thinking: how to pass and catch a football.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, Obama has officially pet the goat.

“[Obama] dodged when asked whether he shared Israel’s view that a ‘nuclear capable’ Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.

‘I’m not going to parse that right now,’ he said, sitting in his office as children played on the South Lawn of the White House at a daylong Easter egg roll.”

While I appreciate the fact that we now have a president who can pronounce the word “strategy”, I would much prefer one who used the term as understood by the rest of the human population. If you’re under an attack, within or outside of a game of football, hell, even if you think an attack might be coming (e.g., there’s a team in front of you wearing different color uniforms), a good “strategy” might involve starting with the acknowledgment that you’re playing a game of football. Well, unless you’re not playing football and the other team, in addition to wearing different color uniforms, is chanting stuff about “Allah” and threatening to counter your no-pass offense with nuclear and biological weapons.

If the other team is the nation of Iran, at this point I’d settle for a president who threatens to throw a fucking football.